Oregon Lottery | Seasonal Campaign
‘Tis the season
for Scratch-its
Creative
Dev
Video
Media
Branding
Scratch-it tickets are Oregon Lottery’s holiday hit—so we created a product campaign as familiar, exciting, and fun as opening a gift on Christmas morning. We focused on the folks who are a big question mark on your holiday gift list. The answer? Everybody loves a Scratch-it, even your weird neighbor!
Our wordmark needed to give warm and fuzzy feelings, without immediately invoking a specific holiday. So we focused on a joyful font and rich, bright tones that eventually ended up influencing the sets in our commercials.
Art Direction
We had a lot of characters to introduce in a short amount of time. Each imagined Scratch-it recipient was paired with a color-coordinated set rich in textures, populated by holiday items specific to their personality. Peep the cat portrait produced by our very own art department.
Big holiday spending means a big holiday media campaign. Across a strategic mix of traditional and digital media channels, we served 42+ million impressions and YOY helped increase Scratch-its interest with younger consumers.
A refreshed digital presence
Dev
Creative
UX
Branding
The Oregon Lottery has grown to be a significant part of the economy in Oregon, funneling billions of dollars into programs that Oregonians care about. When the gaming brand came to Pollinate, they were ready to tackle a huge job: create order, consistency and accessibility for their online presence, bringing forward a cohesive, mobile-first digital brand.
The result was a true agency-wide collaboration, with our Dev, UX, UI and Creative teams working together towards a common goal: Oregon Lottery’s first mobile app, and a brand new OregonLottery.org.
To help wrangle all the pieces, we created a vast library of flexible, easy-to-manage design elements to help keep the site fresh. Each jackpot game was assigned a flexible pattern assembled from spot illustrations by Drew Bardana, and the content library was further fleshed out with iconography and photography.
Inspired by the brightness of lottery games, color was carefully considered, with the goal to have enough contrast to pass AA-level WCAG guidelines.
Phase one for Oregon Lottery’s mobile first approach was to build an on-the-go scanning app available on both iOS and Android. We delivered, thoughtfully balancing the lightheartedness of gaming with the gravity of Lottery’s significant and tangible impact on their community partners.
In 2020, Pollinate launched the new Oregon Lottery WordPress website. We were challenged to build a secure headless static site that used WordPress as the admin, and Azure as the front-end host. Always up for a challenge, we built — and now manage — this headless website, including a custom plugin for static deployments.
With a small digital marketing team at Lottery, efficiencies and cutting back duplicate content entry was a large goal for their team. We were able to deliver on this request by creating a single admin in WordPress that was used by not just the website, but the mobile app as well. This allowed content to be entered in one place, but shared across both platforms — all controlled by APIs created in-house at Pollinate. We are always up for a challenge, and loved bringing our mobile and web development teams together to solve this one.
Launched but Always Optimizing
With a content and player approach first, the website and mobile app have never been “set-it-and-forget-it” tools for Lottery. Pollinate schedules quarterly analytics reviews of both tools, where we do a deep dive into all analytics data available from GA GTM, media campaigns, Microsoft, app stores and in-house Lottery data. This helps us steer larger conversations around optimizations, and helps us determine future road maps. These deep dives have allowed us to continue to launch new features such as single login across platforms and the Second Chance program — and helped Lottery determine more successful marketing and content driven campaigns. That’s a win for everyone!
Uncle Nearest | launch campaign
A legacy, served neat.
Creative
Dev
Digital
Media
Video
Hidden deep within the hills above Lynchburg, Tennessee, was a story waiting to be told — and a whiskey to be discovered.
When Uncle Nearest premium whiskey approached Pollinate, asking if we could deliver a launch campaign defining its unique position in the land of distinctive high-end whiskeys … well, there was no way we could say no. The story was and is riveting, and with one taste, you knew: the whiskey had legs. Award-winning legs.
In a category where drinkers value authenticity, we launched this ultra-premium brand in a way that was true to the man, his incredible story — and his legendary whiskey-making skills.
After more than 150 years, it came to light that a formerly enslaved man named Nathan “Nearest” Green was the first master distiller for a certain local whiskey salesman whose name we can’t use. (Hint: It rhymes with Zack Janiel’s.) Uncle Nearest, as he was known, is believed to have perfected the charcoal-filtering process and many of the techniques still followed today.
One for the books
Step one: a launch strategy. And that was simple: With an irreplaceable spot in history, Uncle Nearest’s story needed to be told. So, we wrote a limited-edition book, which then became the thread tying all of the deliverables together, with the first edition ending up where it belongs: in the Smithsonian.
For our media approach, we focused on raising awareness in key markets (Louisville, Chattanooga, Memphis, Knoxville, Portland, and Nashville) to drive product demand with our core audience and spur sales at liquor stores, bars, and restaurants.
38.4m
impressions
177.5k
site visitors across all markets
34%
increase in site visitors
A fresh look at student debt.
Creative
Video
Media
Dev
We get why student loans aren’t fun to think about—the phrase ‘repayment’ sends a shiver down the spine of anyone who has them. So it makes sense that most people don’t want to think about refinancing those loans, even if it’ll save them money in the long run. When First Tech Federal Credit Union tasked Pollinate with creating an engaging campaign for their student loan refinancing, we met the challenge by focusing on the expert help and repayment flexibility First Tech offers and, with our in-house production team, created two highly memorable (and humorous) spots.
Trust the experts.
Refinancing is a major decision that benefits greatly from professional advice. For this year’s campaign, we drew memorable comparisons to other decisions that are best left to the experts.
Some things are better left in the past.
All borrowers can relate with outgrowing who they were in college–cringing at what we wore, the music we liked, and the hairstyles we had. For this year’s concept, we highlighted another thing to cringe at: the rates you were given then, versus the rates you could have now.
